Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
Page 192
Trigger Happy
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in a drama over which he has no control—for only
then, as we have seen, is it a drama. The author, pace
Roland Barthes, is not quite dead yet.
Pending some future computational revolution,
then, in which a machine might be programmed to
simulate a real human author, with a real author’s
consciousness, creativity and life experiences, truly
interactive narrative is going to be out of reach. These
are the (very difficult) minimum requirements, and they
go beyond even the requirements of Strong AI. There
are heuristic “story-writing” programs already, but their
output, although impressive in its syntactical
sophistication, is worthless in literary terms. There is as
yet no reason to think that solving the data
intensiveness problem by applying algorithmic
processes to the actual plot, rather than to character
behavior, will result in anything a human gameplayer
would be interested in, emotionally or otherwise.
But this should not be surprising, or even
disappointing. Because stories will always be things
that people want to be told. If everyone wanted to make
up their own story, why would they buy so many
novels and cinema tickets? We like stories in general
because they’re not interactive.